Ink Review #28

*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.

Overview

The color/properties:

Taccia Aoguro is a dark blue-black ink. It has a minor red sheen, but it’s dull and it can be difficult to see. I did, however, notice the sheening on all of my test pages. To be honest, if you don’t want this ink to sheen, I don’t even know what to recommend. For reasons we’ll get to in a moment, I don’t think this ink would work very well from a drier pen to even try it.

Rhodia

Leuchtturm1917

Performance on paper:

Taccia Aoguro is well-behaved on paper. During my tests, I didn’t encounter any bleed-through or feathering on any of the test sheets. Surprisingly, the dry times were mostly average, if not mixed. Still, they almost always managed to dry within 20 seconds or less.

The water resistance is a notch above average. There’s the usual clouding around where the droplets hit, but the remains are dark enough and clear enough to be legible.

Midori MD

Maruman

Tomoe River

Kokuyo

Performance in the pen:

The reason that Taccia Aoguro performed so well on paper is because of the abysmal performance it had in the pen. I can barely even say there was a dry flow. There is almost no flow. I’m honestly shocked that it wrote with the needlepoint because with the fine nib, it barely wrote at all. I double-checked the nib multiple times during the test to verify that there was nothing wrong with it, but the results remained the same. The nibs that did work weren’t a lot better: there’s a general lack of lubrication that just made this an unpleasant ink to write with.

To top it off, the cleaning took more effort than it should have, requiring multiple soaks and flushes for the nib units to run clear of ink.

• Performance in a pen: 4/10

• Performance on paper: 10/10

• Color saturation: 7/10

• Sheening: 2/10

• Shading: 2/10

• Dry time: 6.5/10

• Water resistance: 5.5/10

• Ease of cleaning: 6.5/10

• Shimmer: None

My personal thoughts...

I really wasn’t looking forward to writing this review.

At this point, I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to try hundreds of inks. Amongst all of them, there have been few that I didn’t care for, and even fewer that I outright hated. I hate to say it, but I just can’t recommend this ink. The performance is so poor it’s just not enjoyable to use. It’s barely usable at all. And I knew this was going to happen. I’ve tried Aoguro in plenty of pens in the past with the same results: overwhelming dryness, drying out, and skipping. If it wasn’t for the poor performance, this might have been a decent option, but frankly, there are a lot of excellent blue-black inks out there that make this one not even worth considering. Save yourself the frustration.

More images/info:

Tools and materials used in the writing samples:

• A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 7 nib units including a Needlepoint grind, EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and an Architect grind. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same medium wetness.

• A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad

• A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook

• A Midori MD A5 Notebook

• A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook

• A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook

• A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook